I was examining my draft posts on Blogger to see if I'd left any genuinely worthy ones unfinished and noticed something peculiar: there were a lot more draft posts than I thought there should be. Looking more closely, I soon saw that a half-dozen older posts originally published many years ago had all been reverted to drafts on the same date: May 23, 2023. Take a look.
All of the posts carried a little red "hidden" icon and, when I clicked on each one, I saw a note indicating that each one had been "unpublished because it violates Blogger Community Guidelines. To republish, please update the content to adhere to guidelines." Those guidelines are available here, but, looking at them, I honestly can't fathom how any of the above posts, five of which are reviews and one of which is related to a previous review, violates them.
It's quite baffling, especially since these are all very old posts that have existed on this blog for more than a decade. Likewise, none of them, as you can see from the pageview numbers, is an especially popular post that lots of people read and commented upon. The only common element, so far as I can tell, is that five of the six pertain to Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting, though none of them were published by Judges Guild itself. More to the point, I have plenty more Wilderlands-related posts and reviews and none of them were reverted to draft form like these were.
Has anyone else experienced this sort of thing? If so, can you explain the logic behind it? Concerns about arbitrary changes like this are precisely why I keep contemplating moving this blog to another platform. So far I haven't pulled the trigger, because doing so would be a huge headache, especially for a guy like me whose tech skills are minimal. Now I find myself wondering if I shouldn't consider it more seriously ...
UPDATE: Following the advice of others, I re-submitted all the flagged posts to Blogspot without any changes. All of them were re-activated without any explanation of why they were hidden in the first place. Looks like it probably was a case of an errant algorithm.
When blogspot became too glitchy and sturdy to me I moved to wordpress. It is not that difficult today, I don't web stuff too but somehow made it - they do have templates to ease the first steps.
ReplyDeleteBut it is easy to say for someone with few hundred views of the blog.
Maybe start by dabbling with other services without actually creating blog yet. Check what you like, what you're willing to do and how comfortable you feel with other blogging experiences.
That is good advice.
DeleteI moved to Wordpress for the same reason. Blogger was having one issue after another, and the support was unreliable. The migration from Blogger to Wordpress was pretty straightforward.
DeleteMade me check my blogs, no sign of anything similar nor have I heard of such.
ReplyDeleteWild Hypothesis: Does the top post also have the "mishler" tag the others do? Urban Dictionary claims the definition of "mishler" is another way to say "shit" and it's possible (given that site's nature) it may also be an obscure name for a sex act or something else that violates the guidelines - or maybe its an obsecenity in some non-English language instead of just a surname of Germanic origins. Some automatic process may have decided you were publishing something vile under that tag, which seems to be the only common element.
Alternately, maybe someone just really hates Mishler's work and went to the trouble of spuriously reporting the posts as being in violation and blogger didn't bother to check before reverting them.
There are plenty of other posts (mostly reviews) that include the tag "mishler" and are still up. I'm frankly baffled.
Delete54 years of life and this is the first I've heard of that definition... Huh.
Delete@James It is from Urban Dictionary, so take it with a grain of salt. OTOH, it showed up in the top twenty google results, with all the earlier ones being "name origin/meaning" sites, so the search algorithm likes it for some reason.
DeleteThe guidelines say that they review content before taking action, but I've just read your Zagyg review part 2 and there's nothing in there relevant to their guidelines, nor is there any obvious reason why 2 was taken down but not 1 or 3. Strange.
ReplyDeleteThis sounds like a misfire from some moderation algorithm.
ReplyDeleteChanging platform is probably not going to change that - people experience this sort of thing all the time even with the largest SoMe-companies like YouTube or Facebook...
Try writing to Blogspot and ask them what the problem is.
I plan to try and contact Blogspot about it, but I am not hopeful I'll get a clear reply.
DeleteDon't look for logic, as there is none; my understanding is that this has been caused by an overly zealous AI algorithm. Republishing the posts unchanged should be fine.
ReplyDeleteThat happened to my book blog once, a review I did of a biography of Judge Learned Hand. I review Robert E. Howard and true crime and Bill O'Reilly and the one that gets flagged is about America's most famous appellate court judge.
ReplyDeleteIt was so random I spent weeks what could have offended anyone about it. It must have been an algorithm waking up on the wrong side of the Matrix.
Long time ago before they had maps on every phone I worked for a digital map company. We ran a program to find swearwords some joker cartographer might have added to the digital maps. That's when I learned you can't have a Sewage Treatment planet without Eat Me in Treatment being flagged.
ReplyDeleteBlogger might have used some dumb software that does something similar.
I havent been updating my book blog since 2020 because I'm a bit lazy, but I've had it since I was in my 20's. Signed on today and noticed same thing as you --- but it wont tell me which. I noticed some of my last reviews are now in draft. There is nothing wrong with them. I reinstated mine as well but yes, this was annoying and makes me closer to just removing everything one day.
ReplyDelete